The story of India, an exotic land

The past two instalments of the Language Games column were about the various meanings of jack one of the most colourful and multi-purpose words in the English language.
Readers responses varied from wonderings about the research the column might have needed to questions about the sources of many commonly used words and expressions. Some past research of mine is behind the present column.
Tales about countries like India, China and Japan, encouraged by the mystery of exotic, far-away lands and the lack of easy access until 500 years ago, had intrigued Europeans.
Allusions to the supposed characteristics of peoples from these lands entered European languages including English.
There has been an attempt to rid the English language of certain racist and derogatory allusions, and the moral and the success of such attempts is worth some thought.
India, even if it seems redundant to repeat, was discovered by Europeans looking for spices that made the meat of cattle killed in autumn palatable in winter. And by the Portuguese wanting to cut off the Genovese, the Venetians and other middlemen benefiting from the overland trade route.
Columbus made three voyages to the newly-discovered land he called India. By the time he made his final voyage his crew was beginning to suspect that they weren’t really in the Far East. Just to prevent any dissent (and possibly to settle a question of geography), Columbus had his ship’s carpenter fix a gibbet to the staff-rail of his ship and told his men that anyone who suggested that they were not in India would be hanged. Another explanation that Columbus described these people using the Spanish term en Dios (“people in God�), and the term was corrupted to Indians and their land was called India was never taken seriously.
Similarly, any school kid can tell us, the root of the word India can be traced to Sanskrit sindhu which became a specific name when applied to the river now called the Indus. But it turned into India by a more circuitous route.
The ancient Persian language was closely related to Sanskrit and a continuant s in Sanskrit becomes an h in Old Persian. So, while the Indians said sindhu, the Persians said hindu.
To the ancient Persians, hindu meant across-the-Indus-people. Seems that a lot of people could not say a lot of things in those times; Greek word for China was the Sinai, source for Sino as in Sino-Indian.
Many Indians find it surprising some even shocking that Hindu is not an original Indian word, and that the word began to acquire its religious connotation only after the Muslim invasions.
Even the first British attempt to set down Hindu Law was “The Gentoo Code� of 1776. Gentoo was a 17th and 18th Century Anglicism for genito, Portuguese for heathen. Although “Hindu� for India or an Indian is considered archaic in English, some languages (for example, French) have continued the old usage of the word.
And, had the early Persians been able to say s, what this country’s name would be today!
Europeans, by and large, were ignorant about India and, by extension, about the route to China. Close to the city of Montreal in Canada, a canal is called La Chine (China), named so by the French explorer Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) because he thought he had reached China!
I once saw an 18th Century painting of St. Francis Xavier (1506-52), the Jesuit priest who travelled to Japan via India and whose preserved body lies in a Goa cathedral. In the painting, a person paying homage to the saint is wearing the feather head-dress of an American Indian. St. Xavier never travelled to the Americas.
The Spanish painter, obviously relying on the descriptions of “Indian� natives of the Americas, painted a native of India welcoming the saint in the garb of an Amerindian, a Mohawk chief.
Another country of the mystical East, China, calls itself chung kuo or chung wa, “the central country�. One theory is that China is derived from the Ts’in dynasty (221 - 206 BCE) but the Persians had already been calling it Tsinstan since at least 400 BCE. The name probably comes from shian, the ancient capital of the country which eventually became China. Sino.?
An old Chinese story tells that the first Japanese ambassadors were known as the “little hairy people� and Japan was called “land of the little hairy people�. (There is history behind this, I found, for the aborigines of Japan were a very hairy people called the Ainu. These were driven away by the present Japanese people.)
The ambassadors petitioned the Chinese emperor that their country be given a more respectful name. As Japan lies east of China, the name given was jih pen, “sun’s origin�. The Japanese translated jih pen first as nichi hon, then nihon. That’s why their flag shows a rising sun.
The English version could have come from the Malay word japang, although the OED says it is a rendering of the Chinese form Riben.
Since each language has its own way of voicing the consonants and the vowels, names of places as pronounced by locals in their native language seldom sound the same to an outsider.
What better example than Myanmar becoming Burma when repeated by the uninitiated and written in the Roman script. Or Trivandrum for Thiruvananatpuram.
(Articles on language by Anand, a Lucknow-bred Canada-based journalist, are published in North America. His e-mail address is anand@journalist.com.)